In this engaging conversation, Takota shares his journey of discovering permaculture, a concept rooted in mimicking nature’s ingenious systems to meet human needs sustainably. Growing up on a challenging organic farm, he sought an alternative to conventional agriculture due to its environmental and economic limitations. Takota’s exploration led him to permaculture, a transformative approach that he’s dedicated a decade to mastering on his own farm, achieving remarkable results in sustainability and resilience. He emphasizes that permaculture is more than just gardening or farming; it’s a revolutionary way for individuals to regain self-sufficiency and reshape the world.
Transcript:
Permaculture in a single word, is defined as biomimicry. It’s this idea that natural systems have been around for literally billions of years. And through all that research and development, they found all these incredibly ingenious and efficient and beautiful and productive ways to meet the needs of every living thing on this planet. And so the idea behind permaculture is, we also have needs for food, water, shelter, energy. And currently right now on our planet, we’re not meeting those needs in a very sustainable way.
So the idea behind permaculture is how can we learn from nature and mimic it to meet our needs? And this is what really got me excited. It was over a decade ago. The first time I came across the term was around 2011, 2012. I was born and raised on a 250 acre mixed organic farm. I was the youngest of six kids. And farming sucked. When I grew up, there was a ton of work. There was very little money in it, really long hours. And it just wasn’t fun. But even with all that, I loved the lifestyle. I loved being outside. I loved being my own boss.
Being able to sit down for a meal where everything on the table is something…and I loved growing up sitting down at a meal with your family, where everything on the plate is something that you grew. And so, even though it was a ton of work, and it wasn’t always the funnest. I knew that it was something that I always wanted to do. But there was this problem, which is, how am I gonna make a living doing this? How am I gonna pay the bills? And when I graduated from high school, I knew there was no money in farming. My parents wanted me to take over the farm, but they just kind of passively encouraged me to go take something else.
So I went and got a trade in construction. And did that for about four years. But after high school, and I finally had the time to study about more what was going on in the world. Some of these massive problems like the deforestation, the biodiversity loss, the energy crisis, the increasing poverty, the malnutrition, all these different things. And the more that I studied it, the more that I realized that agriculture was at the heart of all of these problems. And agriculture is the heart of civilization, without the division of labor, and people specializing, if people can grow enough food so that other people can go do something else. That’s how we develop civilization. So we’re all not just hunter gatherers.
Agriculture was this massive piece, and I started to see how it was connected to everything else in our world. It was at that point that I started to realize someone else must have figured out how to fix these problems. I can’t be the first person, I’m like, 20 years old. I can’t be the first person to have figured out that there’s something wrong with the world and how we’re gonna solve that. So I literally just typed into the internet, alternatives to organic agriculture. ’cause my parents transitioned to organics in the 1980s, before there was internet, before it was this common thing. And even though we were organic, we were still struggling with all those things I mentioned. So I typed in, “alternatives to organic agriculture”, and the first thing that popped up was this thing called permaculture.
I had no idea what it was. So I went down the rabbit hole and came across that it’s this idea that we can provide all of our needs, our food, water, shelter, energy, and even our community and social needs in a way that mimics the natural patterns of ecosystems that have existed for billions of years. And I was hooked instantly. And since that time, I’ve spent the last decade studying from literally the world’s leading teachers in permaculture. And I’ve also had a lot of time to put this stuff into practice on my own 250 acre farm. And in that time, we have literally transformed everything on our farm. We’ve never worked less, we’ve never made more money. We’ve never had more biodiversity. We’ve never had more resiliency. When it comes to our water cycle and our ability to last through droughts. It really is this panacea.
What I’ve also found is that it can be really complicated. It can be really overwhelming for people to get into, try to integrate all these things in a synergistic way. You can start to see why the world has been broken into all these different monocultures where you just got pigs in this barn, chickens in this barn, corn in this field. We do this over here, that over there, so that everyone can specialize. The problem with that is, it takes a lot of energy and it creates a lot of pollution.
So when I got hooked on permaculture, just from doing these internet searches and watching videos from Jeff Lawton and Bill Mollison and all these greats, I was like, I gotta take a course. So I signed up for the first permaculture design course, which is typically a two week, 72 hour course. And within a month I was out at this location and living in the tent, taking it from this teacher. And I was pretty underwhelmed by the content that I was receiving, because what I had thought was supposed to be this incredibly ingenious system for mimicking natural systems in a way that would provide all of our food, water, sheltered energy needs in a way that would last permanently, its permanent culture. What I found in my first course was that permaculture was really just a bunch of cool gardening tips and tricks. And I came back to the farm and just really dove back into the original literature, bill Olson’s original works, David Holmgren’s stuff.
I started to go really deep into finding these other teachers around the world that really got the potential of what permaculture was and how it could transform not only our individual properties, but the whole world.
So one of my favorite quotes that captures the essence of what permaculture is comes from Bill Mollison. He said, “The problem with all revolutionaries is that they print more words and bullets than they do food and shelter. They’re utterly dependent on the systems they’re trying to overthrow.”
Permaculture isn’t just gardening. It’s not only about homesteading or creating productive farms either. It’s a revolution. It’s a way for people to take back their power and sovereignty and create a life where when you sit down with your family, you can look across the table and see that everything was grown on your farm. Your home is heated by fuels you grew yourself, or it’s designed in a way that it passively cools or warms with the seasons. Your animals are integrated in a manner where you’re not using antibiotics or pharmaceuticals, and your crops don’t need a ton of fertilizers. But it’s not just that. It’s part of a larger vision that is a revolution set to help us reclaim the world.
In the next lesson, we’ll dive into the five major struggles people face when implementing permaculture. These five struggles can be distilled into one main issue. I’ll also introduce a new framework that I like to call the Six Ps of Epistemology.